MetLife Bank last week hired industry veteran Jess Lederman to head its fledgling correspondent lending division, the last piece in the company's plan to become a top five player in mortgage banking.
"We plan on building a major corresponding lending business," said Lederman in a brief interview with National Mortgage News. "Pretty soon the best loan brokers will be converting to bankers and we'll be taking advantage of that."
In particular, what the New Jersey-based bank plans to do is marry its somewhat new warehouse division with Lederman's group, offering lines of credit to nonbanks and then buying (hopefully) a decent chunk of their loan production in the secondary market.
Lederman, who officially joined the bank's Texas-based mortgage division on Jan. 18, said he could not discuss any correspondent goals at this time except to say, "It's small right now, but we'll be building it out piece by piece."
Warehouse officials close to MetLife said the bank hopes to amass upwards of $3 billion in commitments by yearend 2011.
According to figures compiled by NMN, MetLife currently ranks 14th nationwide among all originators. With the addition of both warehouse and correspondent, it hopes to crack the top 10 funders this year, and then the top five within three years, said advisors close to the institution.
Four years ago, MetLife wasn't even in the business, its parent insurance firm having exited mortgages 15 years ago. (In the late spring of 2008, as the mortgage business was beginning to crumble, the bank bought a large chunk of the national lending platform of First Horizon National Corp. of Memphis.)
Lederman noted that by staying out of the business during the "boom years" his new employer avoided many of the "legacy" issues affecting other players in the space.
A few years back, Lederman headed correspondent lending at Ohio Savings, a top-ranked buyer of closed loans. Before that, he was best known in the industry for working on securitizations at Bear Stearns & Co., an early pioneer of “A” paper MBS.
During his career he also has worked at Countrywide Financial Corp.; Great Western, a mortgage affiliate of Frontier Bank FSB, Park City, Utah; and Kinecta Federal Credit Union in California.
